


The Best

by TheWonko



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:29:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22155556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWonko/pseuds/TheWonko
Summary: Zina is Very Good at what she does





	The Best

Zina was jogging when she realised it and was so surprised she almost tripped. Almost. She turned the small hitch in her stride into a little skip so gracefully that an observer wouldn't have even noticed anything happened.

But still, this _would_ explain why her target's house didn't have any magical traps or wards beyond very basic, and easily bypassed, alarm spells.

A mage's private sanctum was where they did their research, the center of their magical life. Most mages had theirs in heavily warded and fortified parts of their homes, both to keep unwanted people _out_ , and to keep dangerous arcane energies _in_. That was the usual way of doing things, and it had served for hundreds of years so far.

But from what Zina knew of her target, making a token nod to tradition while actually doing his own thing wouldn't be out of sorts. Off-site facilities were, in general, more secure and easier to deny as well. The more Zina thought about it, the more she wondered why more mages didn't do this. Tradition, probably. The watchword of magecraft.

Zina finished her jog and arrived back at her hotel room, ensured that no one had tampered with any of her equipment, and prepped for a long day of tailing one Thaddeus Winston, biomancer. With what Zina was being paid for this job, it'd be worth it, no matter how difficult it was.  
  


* * *

  
Of all the rich asshole mages in the world, Franklin D Bates wasn't even in the top fifty. Not even the top ten in America. That didn't stop him from buying a plot of land larger than some towns Zina had been to and putting a house straight out of an architect's nightmare on it, in the middle of a forest desperately trying, and failing, to pretend to be old.

As she stood beneath a completely unnecessary crenelation above the front door, waiting for someone to answer her knock, Zina wondered again if this was a good idea. The man's family checked out, four generations of mages specialising in enchanting items. A young family for the Clock Tower, but old by American standards, everything was new here after all. All Zina knew about the job itself was that Bates had included 50 grams of rock that was apparently from an archaeological site in Mongolia. It was old. _Very_ old, and therefore powerful. And Bates was offering more. Plus he was willing to pay to fly Zina out to the middle of nowhere West Virginia to talk, and would cover all expenses. Not a bad fee, even if Zina ended up not taking the job.

Zina's thoughts were interrupted as the door opened, revealing an absolutely _ancient_ looking man in a coat and tails. He looked Zina up and down, then sighed.

"And you would be the mercenary," he said in a high, reedy voice. Zina was a little upset he didn't have a British accent, just to fit the stereotype completely.

She nodded. "I was invited?"

"Of course you were," the butler sighed again. "Mister Bates is in the dojo currently. I will show you to him."

As bad as the outside of the house was, the inside was somehow worse. The butler led Zina past a dozen rooms, each one more garishly themed than the last, like some sort of caricature of a theme park, until they finally arrived at what had to be the dojo.

Like the other rooms Zina had seen the walls were horribly cluttered with pictures and plaques, but there was actually enough space on the floor to allow a person to move around. In the center of the clear space a man in a karate gi and a moustache that shouldn't have existed off of the face of a 1950's millionaire worked his way smoothly through a kata. To his credit, when he caught sight of Zina and the butler, he didn't immediately stop, instead he finished the sequence and bowed solemnly.

Then he burst toward Zina with a smile and extended his hand.

"Hi!" he said in a voice that was charming despite itself. "Frank Bates. Glad to meet you. You're Ms. Petrovich right? One of the best, I've heard."

"You heard right," said Zina in what both Aislin and Kei had independently termed her "business voice". "What can I do for you?"

"First," said Bates as he stepped back and took a stance, "You can prove you really are as good as they claim."

"You want me to fight you," said Zina, "to prove that I'm good at infiltration."

"Well when you put it like that, it sounds dumb," laughed Bates. "But come on, indulge a millionaire his hobbies."

"Well," said Zina as she shrugged off her hoodie, "when you put it like _that…_ " She squared up opposite Bates, who smiled broadly and immediately leapt in to attack.

Zina dropped below the line of his punch and swept a kick at Bates' knee, which he easily dodged. What he didn't dodge was the fine silver wire Zina had extruded and wrapped around his ankle. While Bates was still moving away from Zina's attack, she pulled on the wire. Hard. Bates fell to the floor and half an instant later was staring at Zina's small fist a millimeter from his nose.

"I like you," laughed Bates as he raised his hands. "I yield. Carmichael, give her the folder."

Zina looked back to see the butler holding a folder filled with papers and photos. She took it and started leafing through the contents.

"The short version," said Bates, "is that a… colleague of mine, Thaddeus Winston, is in breach of contract. I loaned him a certain pair of gloves from my family collection, with the firm, written, and magically binding understanding that he would return them after three months. It's been four now, and I still haven't gotten them back. Therefore, I'm sending a collector, that's you, Ms. Petrovich, to get them back. The folder you're holding has dossiers of Thad's associates, floor plans for his house, and various other sundries you may find useful."

"Seems simple enough," said Zina. "But I'm not cheap. Why not hire someone else?"

"In short, Ms. Pterovich, it's because someone cheaper couldn't get the job done. I tried; their remains are what I've been told the third picture is."

Zina look at the picture, then quickly moved to the next one. That was something that she didn't need to see twice.

"And my payment?"

"The rock you already received is from a much larger sample owned by my family. As best we can figure it fell from the moon fourteen thousand years ago in something called the Velber Approach. Bring me back my property, and the whole rock is yours."

Zina nodded. A rock that old, and from the moon, no less? That was more than enough payment, even considering the fate of the previous reclamation team. "Alright Mage Bates, you have a deal."  
  


* * *

  
Finding Thaddeus' lab turned out to be not very difficult at all, actually. Some things may change, but the arrogance of mages wasn't one of them. Why bother to disguise the fact that you have a place full of magical secrets when you think no one around you is smart enough to notice? Doubly so when the lab is somewhere most "Noble" mages wouldn't be caught dead at. Or, in the case of this sewage treatment facility, would _only_ be found dead at. The local gangs all agreed, eventually, that this was the place to go to dispose of a corpse.

Three levels below ground, behind a huge vat of something Zina didn't want to think too much about was a door emblazoned with warnings about hazardous materials. Enough to make most anyone leave without a second glance. Which was a shame, because that second glance would have revealed the warnings to be complete nonsense, unless liquid nitrogen had become an explosive recently and no one had thought to tell Zina. A third glance showed Zina the series of magical wards on the door.

" _There_ we go," she muttered to herself. "Let's see what Thad is hiding…."

Zina set about disabling the wards in the usual way. A new line here, a smudged sigil there, and suddenly the potent arcane trap was nothing so much as a pretty drawing on the wall. Whatever Winston's strengths were as a biomancer, wards were not one of them.

Once the wards were safely down, Zina slowly opened the door and peered inside. Nothing but a single light fixture, a few shelves, and… and a trap door laying closed in the floor. Shaking her head, Zina took two steps into the room and fell straight through the floor. She barely had time to realise that the room must have been an illusion before she was slinging a wire from her hand up into the ceiling. It wrapped around something and stopped Zina's fall.

For a moment, at least. Zina could feel the wire slicing into and through whatever it was wrapped around until it sliced clean through with a wet squelch, and Zina fell again.

It was enough though. Zina landed hard in a pile of… something soft she didn't want to identify. A moment later a small chunk of meat landed with a wet splat beside her. The remains of whatever her wire had wrapped around. It oozed from the smooth cut, and as Zina stood, she kicked it for good measure. When she did, the image of one of the walls in the false room above flashed for a moment in front of her. This must have been what was making the illusion then. Or at least part of it. Maybe Winston had some tricks up his sleeve after all.

Zina pulled a chemical glow stick from her bag and cracked it, letting its green glow fill the room. Along one wall was a stairway leading up to the still-open door she had fallen through, and on the opposite wall was a large arch leading into a hallway.

Shrugging to herself, Zina stepped through the arch, keeping an eye out for any irregularities that could indicate another illusion, or some other danger. Irregularities like the corroded spot directly in front of her with a half-dissolved rat skeleton a few inches in front of it. A quick glance at the ceiling showed a series of nodules, one every five feet or so along the corridor, swaying back and forth. Zina tossed a small pebble onto the corroded spot and watched.

Nothing happened.

Sighing, Zina took the still-twitching fragment of illusion generator and threw it into the hallway.

The nodules turned and spat globs of thick liquid at the chunk and it bubbled and began to dissolve wherever it was hit. Within a minute it was just another spot on the floor. The rat must've been lucky. Or unlucky, depending on how you looked at things. This more like what Zina had been expecting to find outside a mage's sanctum. Winston probably had a way to disable these things, but that could be anything from a passphrase to them being bred not to attack him. Still, Zina was prepared and if the acid spewers reacted to living things, then the solution was obvious.

Zina pulled a few balls of lead and a piece of chalk from her pocket, sketched a quick circle and some runes on the ground around the balls, and chanted. After a moment, the lead balls unfolded into small, spider-like shapes and dashed into the hallway and up the walls. Zina watched patiently as each ball climbed into the hole each nodule used to shoot out acid and lodged itself in, blocking the nodule.

Zina erased her circle and cautiously took a step into the hallway, ready to jump back at a moment's notice. All the nodules turned toward her, but nothing came out. Her golems would dissolve in the acid after maybe half an hour, but for now they were doing their jobs. Zina dashed to the far end of the hall to a small, unassuming door. She ran a keen eye over it, checking for any sort of trap or defense, and found absolutely nothing. Winston must have thought the defenses he had in place were enough. It wasn't even locked.

The door opened smoothly into a room filled with transparent vats of liquid with cloudy shapes inside them. Zina didn't want to think about what was in those. Along the back wall was a series of shelves and a desk covered in papers. Her target would be back there if it were anywhere, but a quick search showed nothing but research notes. Probably worth a lot to the right person, but Zina didn't have a way to make copies and taking the notes themselves would let Winston know someone had been in his lab. Revealing her presence on a job where she hadn't been paid to do so rubbed at Zina's pride the wrong way.

Still, the gloves weren't in Winston's home and they weren't in his lab. That meant either there was a third location or, given that the info Zina had on Winston suggested he liked to keep things easy to access, he had the gloves with him. Which meant Zina would have to find him again and take the gloves. It wouldn't be hard, but even an indirect encounter with a mage could be dangerous. Zina left the lab and closed the door behind her.

As Zina reached the end of the hallway, she heard the door above her open. She dashed to the pile that had cushioned her fall and made herself as small as possible behind it. A light flicked on and a set of footsteps came down the stairs. Zina peeked around the pile, she saw now it was disturbingly pink and fleshy, to see Thaddeus Winston himself coming down. And with the gloves Bates had sent Zina for tucked casually in the pocket of his coat.

Zina had to act fast, but getting things done quickly and quietly was where she shined. A thin wire sliced a strip off the pile in front of her, and a thicker bundle of them carried it to Winston. From there it was a simple act of legerdemain to swap the strip with the gloves and bring them to Zina. After that, all Zina had to do was wait for Winston to turn his back to Zina's hiding place and she could dash up the stairs to freedom.

* * *

When Franklin Bates entered his office that day, he hadn't expected much beyond the usual pile of mail and his computer. Instead he found a surprise. The very pair of gloves that had been out of his possession for far too long.

"Carmichael?" Bates said to the butler, walking a few steps behind him, "Check the vault please, and if the Velber sample is still there, send it to Ms. Petrovich with my thanks."

"Very good sir, and if the sample isn't there?"

"Send her a note thanking her for her services, and let her know that she truly is the best."


End file.
